Ten Minutes with Vinnie Mirchandani – Industry Expert
Polymath is a Greek word for Renaissance person like Leonardo da Vinci - good at many disciplines. Vinnie Mirchandani’s new book sheds light on modern day enterprise polymaths and how they are leveraging a wide range of technologies to solve day-to-day issues and the “Grand Challenges” the world faces.
Your book, “The New Polymath”, explores a wide range of technologies--from cloud computing to emerging medicine. What is the New Polymath and what can the reader expect to learn?
“The New Polymath” is about today’s enterprises that are good at many technologies. For example, German chemical company BASF has been bioengineering new forms of rice and corn and other types of crops. They have a green house in Belgium where they are monitoring thousands of rice seedlings and look at if you modify a particular gene in one seedling, how does it grow? They have bioinformatics technology, RFID chips and high speed cameras for monitoring the seedlings, robotics moving them around, etc. There are probably 10 or 12 different technologies working in tandem.
There are many examples in the book how multiple technologies are coming together in a single solution – that’s the concept behind “The New Polymath.”
How can business professionals leverage this information to solve challenges in their own business?
There are many lessons to take away. The first is to think big and try to solve some thorny problems. For example, scientists and engineers at the National Academy of Engineering came up with 14 grand challenges including reverse engineering the brain and making sure water is available around the world. In 2000, the United Nations came up with millennium development goals such as reducing infant mortality and improving female education around the world. These are almost ‘boil the ocean’ kind of calls, but if you look at the polymaths I have in the book, these big, external challenges are what drives them.
The second message is that people need to get out of their silos and look beyond their focus area. There is an abundance of technology from biotech to cleantech to healthtech to infotech. We have to stretch our own comfort zone and look at bundling a wide range of technologies
A third message centers on the new ethics that are coming out of all this technology evolution. For example, now that the human genome has been decoded, individuals can see their genetic makeup and what they are susceptible to. Based on that, there are women going in for elective surgery to have their breasts removed, even before there is any sign of breast cancer. There is no insurance that pays for that and there are no cancer survivor groups for them because they are not technically “survivors”. We need a mechanism to discuss such issues and others like biofuel-food tradeoffs, the use and misuse of patents, and of course, continue the on-going debate on privacy. The convergence of multiple technologies described in the book is creating new ethical issues at phenomenal rates and we are just not discussing them enough.
The book is chockfull of quotes and anecdotes from industry luminaries and established leaders, bloggers, and analysts. What common themes emerged from your research?
I tried to give the 150+ innovative people, products and places profiled in the book most of the airtime and tried to minimize my voice or come up with too many “glib” lists. The last chapter of the book summarizes the learning into 10 guideposts, but given the countries, processes, industries and technologies the book covers, I do not want to mislead readers and say that is the essence that summarizes - each reader will find inspiration from a different set of the 150+ innovators in the book.
What was the biggest lesson you’ve learned through the process of writing and publishing your book and what advice would you offer other aspiring authors?
I learned that researching and writing the book is only 20 percent of the effort. The editing process on a technology book is very demanding because you have to constantly update it. In the five months between submitting the manuscript and when it came out, I probably updated three to four statistics on a monthly basis. Countless interviewees changed jobs, companies merged, laws were passed, new products introduced - it is an understatement to say it is a dynamic industry.
The other take away is the publishing industry does not really market a book. The onus is more on the author and distributors like Amazon.com. So, I revved up my social networks dramatically around the world. The book has its own Facebook page, Linked In group, dedicated website and Twitter stream. I also offered many bloggers an advance copy. Many blogged reviews, conducted video interviews, created animotos, podcasts, jaiku contests - new digital ways of presenting a hard copy book. I am grateful for all the support I have received.
To order your copy of “The New Polymath: Profiles In Compound-Technology Innovations,” click here.
